To Glasgow, to meet Arty. Kim texted "Glasgow? That's a long way to go for a bit of skirt. Or have all the local women got injunctions against you?" The 0650 to Glasgow was full of men strapped into ties doing the sort of metacrap that passes for work nowadays. Someone was reading a section entitled "Things to Consider When Using Coaching as a Strategy".

I found my way to where I was staying through an underpass, a field in which some Sikhs were playing cricket seriously, and some enormous, almost unreal tower blocks that seemed to float about the deserted streets.

Arty from Glasgow had eventually replied, at 8pm the previous night. We met in The Horseshoe Bar and clicked immediately; I was falling over myself with things to say. She was very interesting about the sectarianism in Glasgow, about how people use apparently banal conversation about football to position you. Nonetheless, when she went to the loo I texted Kim saying "Date going well but don't think I'm going to get any action". I could feel the deathly hand of friendship being sexlessly extended.

It ended with a little cheek kiss. I texted Kim again. "Wish there was a way of saying, the conversation was fine and you're fit enough. Shall we go somewhere?"

Arty replied "Yes, I picked up on that." Oops. I'd sent it to Arty instead of Kim.

"I'm terribly sorry Arty that wasn't meant for you. So sorry, misdirected text strikes again. I was just telling someone else about tonight, which I enjoyed."

"I'm laughing my head off, my cat is amused. I am glad you think I fit enough [sic]. You are FUN if a little inept at texting." By now, I was a bit pissed and was feeling a bit frisky. The Daily Mail-reading couple at the next table didn't look promising, her in a white trouser suit, blonde hair erect like a toilet brush. I wrote a rather filthy postcard to Frances, which, thank God, I didn't post.

The following morning my host and I sat round. He made himself some coffee. We chatted for an hour or so and I realised that nothing approaching breakfast was forthcoming, so I set off into Glasgow and found a little Italian cafe where I had a fried egg, potato scone and black pudding roll. In a charity shop I found an old cord jacket which makes me look like a Theology lecturer in a minor Welsh university. I was curious about the perfumes in House of Fraser. "What do you wear at the moment?" the assistant asked. It had never occurred to me that one "wears" a perfume. "You'll laugh," I said, and told him about the bottle of Chanel that I'd found on the train a while ago, which I like a great deal and use sparingly, when I'm meeting women I like. He was tactfully eloquent about the way that perfumes for women often suit men too. He gave me some Fahrenheit to try but it wore off after a few hours.

Thus expensively fragranced and dressed in a way which suggested I was more than capable of dealing with the doubts over Manichean eschatalogy that crop up in a typical afternoon in the backstreet boozers of Glasgow, I set to the real business of the day, which was to get pissed. In The Scotia, we watched Andy Murray in the tennis until the landlady thought that watching Scotland's greatest living sportsman playing in the world's finest tennis tournament would be best done with the TV volume off, in favour of canned music. The conversation became collective; I understood about as much of it as I understand groups of French people, but followed the cues and laughed in the right places and three of them shook my hand as I left.

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Ye Return of Ye Bloggers of Yore section: one or two long term readers might be as pleased as I was to see Smacked Face back in business, her impeccable musical taste untarnished by her exile at "the arse end of the world", at Puttingoutfire. Her friend The Opinionated Diner is also well worth a look.

A couple of weeks ago I sent an invitation round to some people whom I though might appreciate it, about an architectural and historical walk round Silverdale. No-one took me up on it, and what a night they missed. It's a rangy village, with a shoreline, early ninetheenth century limestone houses, Italianate architecture, woods which come right into the village, and a pub which looks like a set for a Scooby Doo film.

Arriving early by train, the only person not in a car, I finished Heart of Darkness in the Silverdale Hotel, then left the Upper Congo for the secret interior of deepest Lancashire. Our guide took us to the shore and an 1830s bath house and the terrace which was added thirty years later. The glazed bay was seductive and quietly treacherous, having swallowed scores of travellers over the years, people who wanted a much quicker way to the Furness peninsula than the coast road, but who ignored local advice about the tides after a few hours in the inn.

He showed us houses grand and humble in a talk full of unGoogleable detail. "...And in fact he made a lot of money as a commercial traveller, selling lingerie. So you could say he travelled in ladies' underwear." "Don't we all?" said a probation officer. We went through woods (or "lots" as they are called locally) and did some discreet, hushed trespassing in order to see a terraced Mawson garden.

But what a finale. He led us into a fabulous private garden, in the centre of which is Lindeth Tower. "You will know Mrs Gaskell, of course," he said, and my ears pricked up, having just read Cranford and Cousin Phillis on holiday. "You might be aware that she wrote Ruth and some of Mary Barton in this tower." He read us extracts from Gaskell's diaries and letters mentioning the place. But better still: we were to go up to the top of the normally tenanted building. Three tiny rooms, one on each floor, connected by precipitious staircases, and at the top, views which I wish had quietened us. Instead, socially and culturally programmed into commenting on absolutely fucking everything, we had to say how "amazing" it was.

Back in the village, we bought the guide a couple of pints and expressed sincere thanks. But the Silverdale Hotel is a forgettable pub, and I hastened away. Up a potholed, neglected, overshadowed, and on dark nights pitch black lane, lies the Woodlands Hotel. Four real ales, all on gravity dispense; mismatched formica tables, an execrably painted portrait, and oscillating purple wallpaper; I've learnt to sit with my back to it because it starts doing a Bridget Riley with my eyes after a couple of pints.

The taxi driver arrived to take me to the station. He was an articulate man, the first time I've heard the word "moribund" (as what the village is not) in a taxi, although I'm glad the conversation was good because the fare was almost as breathtaking as the scenery, at over a pound a minute. I was the only person on the rail replacement bus service back to Lancaster. The driver shared her chocolate, asked me where I'd been, and made some elongated undulating "ooh" sounds which made me feel uneasy about going into much detail about it, lest she considered me a bit poncy.

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In Other News: Arty from Glasgow does reply, eventually. "Yes it would be nice to meet you. Tuesday would be good for me." Now I've just got to get a coherent story as to why I'm going there, repeat it to myself a few times and test it for internal inconsistencies. I'll see what conferences are on at the two universities; that's a plausible cover story for a PhD student.

Kirsty and I used to live on a short street whose name is compressed into superscript on most maps. Socially it approaches Aneurin Bevan's postwar hope that the development of public housing would mean that "the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the farm labourer" would share a life in the same streets. The public nature of childrearing and driving our tank of a triple pram round (with the constant battles against car owners who view pavements as car parks), gave us a social status on the street from which we still both benefit.

The other day I found a huge, deformed vehicle perched on the pavement about two feet from the front door. The size of it, the way it was parked, the mixture of wealth and arrogance and ignorance it expressed, flared an anger in me. I wrote a gritted teeth note saying that as neither of us own a car they are welcome to use the space outside the house to park, but that it would be nice if we could see at least some of the pavement. I put it under its wiper, walked around Kirsty's front room muttering more articulate versions of my complaint to myself, then took it back, unsure of how I would control myself in an argument with the people to whom the car belongs.

I know them because I used to do some voluntary work for a well-known charity which aims to remove children from stairwells, and used to meet the female half at its frustratingly sober meetings. The social ecology of Acacia Avenue is poised harmoniously but precariously. We know someone who can come in and feed the cat whilst on holiday; we spontaneously host each others' children when their parents are detained at work and there's constant chatter which works to create social bonds.

The vast, taciturn owner of the car, lacking the imagination to know what to do with money but to find ways to increase it, owns four properties on the street. They rent them out to students who have no investment in its life. Girl drivers in black makeup smile forcedly when they see me and Jenny playing cricket in the street, making a palimpsest of an apology as they shoo us by threatened might onto the pavement. They're aware that they ought to apologise for disrupting a scene of street life, whilst in truth thinking that street games should be swept into social history. They unload single-use plastic bags from a supermarket less than a mile away.

I don't like what this couple are doing to the street. Their wealth, their assumption that they can appropriate more and more houses to themselves, the way they see our street as a financial resource. And most irritating of all, their huge out-of-proportion car jammed up against Kirsty's front window, with Mr Silent's oafish bulk at horrible eye level when he lumbers his unthinkable bottom into the passenger seat.

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In Other News: Sexylooking from Ovineton amusingly gives me the brush off, informing me that a man came around to do the gardening and got rather hot. I told her I hope everything came up beautifully.

Arty from Glasgow has gone quiet for a week now about an email mentioning my trip up there on Tuesday / Wednesday to try to get to see her plan my latest "artistic" cavorting project.

5pm, in Wetherspoons, minding my own business, reading the paper. The man behind me says "What are you reading?"

Oh fuck, here we go. I'm about to have a Tired Dad episode.

The paper.
Which one?
The Guardian.
What, the London Guardian?
No, the Manchester Guardian.
Where did you buy that?

It was getting out of hand, and I let go a stage whispered "For fuck's sake" to preface an annoyed "Just up there", and resolved to ignore anything else.

"Bloody middle class, middle class", I heard him muttering. It went on in that distinct Northern tone of inverse snobbery for a few minutes, until I silently gathered my middle class things and my middle class paper to find a seat at the opposite end of the pub. At which point he introduced an overdue note of humour.

"You going? Can I get you a taxi to Waitrose?"

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Back from France, re-enthused about the language, I send an email to a local language school enquiring about intensive French courses. A five day course costs £1500. I replied saying that £1500 is "way beyond my budget", hoping that she'd come back with details of the Asda-grade EconoFrench course they're reluctant to advertise, but no.

Instead, I'm downloading an immersive course called French in Action, which, as well as being free, has the added attraction of using a well-known motivational technique for some language learners by "focusing on Mireille's legs, or breasts when she isn't wearing a bra".

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I am a Twitter sensation! Or slight itch anyway. Fiddling about with my LinkedIn profile during a PhD avoidance session, I pressed something, I know not what, and it sent invites to everyone in my address book. A friend of mine mentioned it on Twitter and it was retweeted at least six times.

It was less fun than it sounds: I got a couple of snotty emails from people I hardly know who have obviously operated all computer programs perfectly since birth, and was temporarily banned from the local freecycling group.

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An overdue mention goes to Unbearable, who has been involved in producing a beautiful looking handmade book which combines some Springsteen lyrics for Thunder Road with Nick Hornby's essay about it; which "annihilated a great friendship".

Went for a pub tea in Morecambe with Denise. Black pudding, fried egg, and salad. Bit of a bodge job of a meal, thought it would come with some vegetables. Denise is my former work colleague from Bloom and Doom to whom Frances sent some unpleasant texts from my phone after she went paranoidially through it one night and discovered the flirty texts which Denise and I exchange.

I don't know if it was the new local cider that we were drinking, but I got talking about Seriouscrush for a bit and nearly felt tearful, telling Denise that had Seriouscrush chosen me I'd have been able to say honestly, that she's the most beautiful woman in the world, that I desire her solely, and that I would be hers, and that I would belong to her.

Denise was going to her church singing practice at 8pm. We walked up to the building, at which I wondered. 1837 but it looked earlier. A group of teenagers had congregated at the entrance for an evening out spitting. Denise invited me in to have a look round. Her fellow singers were all from one family. Dad was strapping on an electric guitar.

I'd missed the bus back home, so I walked back along the prom a few stops until the next one. The skies of Morecambe Bay, grey and metallic, with infinitely graduated light, the thousands of wormcasts on the wetted monochrome shore. It had a slow, sad beauty, and I missed Seriouscrush and imagined walking with her looking at this, holding her hand, feeling every millimetre of her touch, saying nothing, saying everything.